Better stories for a gender equal and fairer social recovery from outbreaks: learnings from the RESISTIRÉ project

The pandemic has radically shifted how society is organised, with increased work from home, home-schooling, and intensification of online presence, all with specific (un)intended implications on paid and unpaid care work. These implications, like those of other crises, are gendered and manifest along sex, age, disability, ethnicity/race, migration status, religion, social class, and the intersections between these inequalities. While many studies have identified these unequal and negative impacts, and point to significant care-related inequalities, the specific contribution of this paper is a different one, namely to point towards inspiring practices as better stories of and in the care domain during the pandemic. The aim is to make these better stories visible and to think about these as ways forward to mitigate the unequal impacts of COVID-19 and its policy responses. Theoretically, the approach is based on ‘better stories’, as developed by Dina Georgis (2013, Better Story. Queer Affects from the Middle East, New York: State University). The paper uses both quantitative and qualitative data, gathered from the EU27, Iceland, Serbia, Turkey, and the UK, within the EU H2020 project RESISTIRÉ.